The Caisse d’Epargne

The Caisse d’Epargne is a French semi-cooperative banking group, founded in 1818, with around 4700 branches in the country. The group is active in retail and private banking, as well as holding a significant stake in the publicly traded investment bank Natixis. The Caisse d’Epargne has just come out with an innovation that many financial professionals find strange to say the least. The French bank has been closing many branches and in order to compensate for all these closures and because many people still want to face someone to talk to when it comes to their financial issues, the bank wishes to hire financial advisers. In fact, it turns out that it is difficult for banks to close branches while maintaining local contact with its customers. At the start, this concept will only be tried in three French locations, but the idea is clearly to spread it to the whole country at a later stage. So what is this strange innovation? Well, La Caisse d’Epargne is going to hire financial advisers but will not pay them! Well, they will be paid but only on a commission basis. In other words, these advisers will only be remunerated when they manage to sell a Caisse d’Epargne financial product to a client. Logically, most commissioned products will be the most recommended. A shortcoming currently existing for all non-independent financial advisers and the main reason why we have always thought that performance-based financial advisers were the best ones for clients. You could find our ranking by clicking here.

Discrimination in Financial Advisory jobs?

Nowadays, as you have certainly already noticed, there are statistics about almost every topic you could think about. Statistics is something that you come across all the time when you are passionate like we are about Finance. We have recently looked at different studies in respect of relation between races, gender and money management. As you could easily expect from the word “races” these studies are US-based. In fact, there are few other countries where race is such an important topic. One of these studies has shown that less than 4% of US Financial advisors are not White nor Asian. At the same time, 13% of American self-identify as being black or African American. An even larger part of the US population is made of non-white Latinos. Similarly, other studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of clients of financial advisors were White or Asian. The Center for Financial planning believes that changes need to be made in the profession in order to create a more diverse and sustainable financial planning profession. It turns out however that a vast majority of the clients do not care about the appearance of their advisers. Instead, they are looking for experience, knowledge and above all performance. Performance being often linked to experience and knowledge. It is also interesting to see that several other studies have also shown that blacks, generally speaking, are less likely to invest in stocks than whites because they are more conservative investors. This would need to be changed as well if minorities want to make more with their money.

The most difficult part of the financial advisor job is to find new clients

This is not surprising, but when a person suddenly becomes wealthy by selling a company, taking possession of an inheritance, or in a more extreme case by winning a lottery, that person is suddenly interesting for a lot of financial advisers. The most difficult part of the financial advisor job is to find new clients. This is more difficult than it may sounds. If you win the lottery tomorrow, there are high chances that you will start receiving many phone calls from financial advisors willing to meet you to explain to you how well they can help you manage your news wealth. Financial advisors fight between each other to convince rich prospective clients. However, there different types of financial advisors. Robert van den Eijck once pointed out that "you can compare a private banker to a ready-to-wear clothing salesman and a wealth manager to a tailor who makes tailor-made clothing, although the craft has evolved over the years." Private bankers work in the private banking divisions of large retail banks or investment banks, they often simply have a product from their own bank to sell to the clients. On the other hand, the wealth manager will be more interested in understanding all the aspects of a potential client in order to provide the best-tailored service. That does not mean though that all wealth managers provide better services than private bankers. It actually depends on many factors and the own circumstances of every client.

Did you arrange an appointment with a financial adviser?

Did you arrange an appointment with a financial adviser? Ask you why are the reasons you did it. It could be because you have money to invest or maybe because you want to build up incremental capital Whatever the reason can be, you need to take the time to prepare for the interview with your adviser.

The Association of Professional Financial Advisers

Today, let's focus on The Association of Professional Financial Advisers. This association is a trade association made up of financial advisers and is located in the United Kingdom. It is currently chaired by Lord Deben. The Association of Professional Financial Advisers specializes in the financial services sector. It represents the collective interests of its membership. The association campaigns in the interest of the financial adviser community and lobbies regulators and the government both at a national and a European level.